General

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to set aside $12 million for buyouts and early retirements in coming months, as part of an effort to begin “reshaping” the agency’s workforce under the Trump administration.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski vowed Thursday to move President Trump’s nominee for Interior deputy secretary, David Bernhardt, to a vote as soon as possible, despite opposition raised by Democrats over his past experience.

Top Senate Republicans are urging President Trump not to slash funding for Department of Energy research programs, following reports that the full fiscal 2018 budget will seek deep cuts at the department.

Global equities showed signs of stabilizing at the end of a turbulent week in which investors confronted political crises in Washington and Brazil. Oil headed for a second weekly gain as OPEC members supported Saudi Arabian and Russian pledges to extend supply cuts.

China has successfully extracted gas from an ice-like substance mined from the South China Sea in a development that will help secure the country’s energy security, a minister has been quoted by media reports as saying.

Drilling rigs and roughnecks are hot commodities once again across the Montney shale formation in northern British Columbia and Alberta, and companies like Grimes Well Servicing Ltd. are having a hard time keeping up with demand.

Utilities and Infrastructure

A federal lawsuit says a Georgia city’s policies illegally restrict access to utility services and that those policies disproportionately affect black and Latino residents. The lawsuit against the city of LaGrange was filed Thursday in federal court in Atlanta.

Community choice aggregation (CCA) is growing in popularity in California, as the state’s utility sector embraces more forms of customer choice. A recent report estimated that by the mid-2020s, up to 85% of retail load could be supplied through CCAs, rooftop solar and direct access providers.

Renewables

Maryland’s new offshore wind policy is more than a play for windmills. It’s also a play for manufacturing jobs. The Maryland Public Service Commission considered a smaller project but decided that the larger one was justified by its forecasted economic benefits: almost 9,700 jobs and $1.8 billion of in-state spending over 20 years.

Facing maturing markets, increased competition and rising customer acquisition costs, residential solar companies like Vivint and SolarCity are curtailing operations out of less promising states to focus on profitability, according to a recent report from GTM Research.

Coal

Weekly US coal production was an estimated 13.49 million st in the week that ended May 13, up 1.2% from the prior week and 17.6% above the year-ago week, US Energy Information Administration data showed Thursday.

A radioactive “hot spot” discovered in a nuclear waste shipment in South Carolina is being cited by Nevada’s top nuclear safety official as fresh evidence of the folly of plans to transport thousands of tons of even-more-dangerous material to Yucca Mountain if a repository is built there.

Climate

The Trump administration is delaying enforcement of an Obama administration regulation that would have required state and local officials to measure greenhouse gas emissions related to the use of specific highways.

We went to Antarctica to understand how changes to its vast ice sheet might affect the world. The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration.

President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and a very expensive “tax” on American businesses that make the US less competitive. He has threatened to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, in which countries around the world pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to keep temperatures from rising past the critical 2°C mark.

The entire Antarctic Peninsula is undergoing “fundamental and widespread” ecological change, a new study finds. Recent research discovered ice melting on the surface across Antarctica – even at higher elevations. Now, scientists have found moss and microbes growing on the continent.

Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives

A flurry of federal policies designed to loosen environmental regulations of coal-fired generation and roll back emissions reduction targets aren’t having their intended effect: Utilities across the United States continue to announce coal plant closures and reaffirm previous plans to remove coal from their generation fleets.

There is plenty to occupy attention just down Interstate 82 at the Hanford nuclear reservation, especially massive amounts of nuclear waste stored in tanks and the long-delayed effort to deal with it. So it has been relatively easy to overlook the shortcomings of a tunnel that stored radioactive waste in rail cars — and the decades-long developments that led to its collapse last week.

As if Donald Trump hasn’t already done enough to ensure his place as the most anti-environmental president in U.S. history, he recently ordered the Interior Department to undertake an unprecedented review of the status of 27 national monuments established in the U.S. since 1996.

Research Reports

OIG inspected progress being made in the United States to meet the requirements of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which currently has 56 participating nations concerned about worldwide corruption and mismanagement of extractive resources such as oil, natural gas, coal, gold, and renewable energy .